SAG-AFTRA Election: LA Local Wins Apathy Award For Lowest Voter Turnout In U.S.

The Los Angeles local of SAG-AFTRA is not only the union’s largest, it’s also its most apathetic. In the recent elections held by the guild’s 25 regional locals, LA had the lowest voter turnout as a percentage of members eligible to vote. Of course, that’s not counting the 0% voter turnout at nine locals whose members didn’t cast a single ballot for their local leaders because they all were running unopposed. Two of those locals haven’t held a contested election since the union was formed in 2012 by the merger of SAG and AFTRA.

Of the 16 locals that did cast ballots in local races, LA ranked last with only 16.55% of the eligible members voting, followed by Nashville (16.68%) and Dallas-Fort Worth (18.16%). Of those 16 locals, seven saw turnouts of less than 20%. By comparison, 21.72% of the union’s total membership cast ballots in the national races for president and secretary-treasurer, won by Ken Howard and Jane Austin, respectively.

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New England, at 28.86%, scored the highest turnout as a percentage of its membership, followed by New Orleans (27.68%), Seattle (27.34%) and Nevada (25.72%) – the only locals where more than one in four eligible members voted in local elections.

By the numbers, this is how the locals voted — broken down by eligible members, number of ballots cast and turnout percentage:

Los Angeles:
69,817
11,557
16.55%Nashville:
1,295
216
16.68%

Dallas-Fort Worth
947
172
18.16%

Houston-Austin
959
176
18.35%

New York
31,555
5,958
18.88%

Washington/Mid-Atlantic
4,235
801
18.91%

San Francisco-Northern California
4,029
776
19.26%

Chicago
3,854
799
20.73%

Philadelphia
2,641
604
22.87%

San Diego
1,223
282
23.06%

Miami
3,321
768
23.13%

Ohio-Pittsburgh
1,422
339
23.84%

Nevada
1,143
294
25.72%

Seattle
1,280
350
27.34%

New Orleans
766
212
27.68%

New England
3,001
866
28.86%

No numbers are available for the nine locals whose officers, board members and convention delegates were “elected without the necessity of a membership vote.” That’s Atlanta, Colorado, Michigan, New Mexico, Portland, Hawaii, the Missouri Valley, the Twin Cities and Arizona-Utah. Two of those locals – Michigan and Portland – haven’t held a contested election since the merger of SAG and AFTRA in 2012.